Not really sure where to post this, but I guess this would be the best place. (I also did a search for similar threads, but I couldn't find any).
Anyway, I was wondering what kind of browsers you guys are using and if you can give me some recommendations. I guess most people use IE, FF and/or Chrome, but it never hurts to ask, haha.
I'm using Opera now, but I'm looking for some alternatives. Below is why (spoilered to keep this post a bit clearer :P)
! So… I've been using Opera for a long time, and I've always loved it. Until recently that is. A while ago, my hard drive died, so I bought a new one and I reinstalled all my programs and things, including Opera. Now, for some reason, I guess Opera somehow never updated on my old hard drive, so I was still running version 12.something there. That means I never got the updates after version 15, after which Opera went through some huge changes (including the change from the Presto engine to WebKit), which caused many long-time Opera users to switch to other browsers. So, when I reinstalled Opera, I got version 19.0 (which I'm using now) and it really is that much different that I don't really like it all that much anymore. It's still really fast though, which was one of the main reasons why I always used Opera in the first place, so for now I'm still using it; but I'm looking for a good replacement.
! My main problems with the new Opera are the aforementioned abandonment of the Presto engine, but even more the fact that the new Opera runs several processes instead of just one (while I'm typing this, there are 8(!) Opera-processes running). And while one of these processes doesn't use a lot of memory, eight or more of them definitely use a crapload of it. And since my PC is pretty old and not very good, I'm pretty sure that this is going to cause me trouble sooner or later.
So, what I'm looking for is mainly a fast and lightweight browser. I don't need a lot of fancy options or other things, as long as I can browse the internet securely and everything is displayed properly (java and flash things and such).
I've tried Midori, since I read some good reviews about it being fast and small; but for me it wasn't all that fast at all and it crashed quite often, so I wasn't really happy with it.
I also tried Otter, which aims to recreate Opera 12.x, but it just isn't really "finished" enough to compete with other browsers.
If at all possible, I'd like to stay away from using Chrome, since I don't like the way Google is trying to sneak it onto my computer with every Google-related thing I do on the internet. I don't want to integrate all my online activity with Google and I'm already quite unhappy with how they made me link my Hotmail-account to Youtube and later my Youtube-account to Google+, on which I didn't even want an account in the first place.
So, anyway… If anyone has some good suggestions for browsers, fire away!